Team Fortress 2 finally lands on Mac OS X

My initial experience of playing TF2 on Mac was to be taunted by other players for playing TF2 on a Mac -- Mac and PC gamers all play together on the same servers. How little they knew of my addiction to the Team Fortress series for the last decade.

On my 2GHz Core 2 Duo MacBook, with 4GB of DDR3 RAM and Nvidia GeForce 9400M graphics, the game plays well, graphically at least. I experienced very choppy audio (as I did with Half Life 2 for Mac), but I'm blaming that on my machine as I haven't been able to test it on another Mac yet.

OS X users playing TF2 before Monday 14 June will receive Apple iPod-style white earbuds for their in-game characters as a bonus -- a sure fire way to get noticed for being a Mac-powered enemy.

To say the delay to get Team Fortress on Apple's platform has been frustrating is something of an understatement. When it launched Steam for Mac, Valve included of its main titles only Portal -- ignoring the games that really put the company and its platform on the map, such as Half Life and Team Fortress.

Half Life 2 and Half Life 2 Episode 1 & 2 finally landed on Mac a couple of weeks later as Valve announced the availability of Orange Box on OS X. But Team Fortress 2 was nowhere to be seen.

But good things come to those who wait. You can download TF2as of now.